Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/56

the British merchants in order to escape death. Other charges were formulated, some of them relating to incidents connected with the conduct of the war and therefore in no way responsible for its inception; some to circumstances which certainly could not in themselves have constituted a warrant for any international rupture. In the latter category were marshalled restriction of foreign trade to Canton, a restriction plainly within China's sovereign right to impose; maintenance of the Hong Merchants monopoly, a system not only justified by the failure of the British to establish any competent machinery for the control of their nationals, but also paralleled by the monopoly they had themselves conferred on the East India Company; exactions to which the trade was subjected by these merchants, exactions in spite of which it flourished and grew to large dimensions; and other petty grievances whose appearance in the preamble of a declaration of war lent to the whole missive an air of insincerity. In the former category were included duplicity on the part of the Chinese Government in sending Kishen to negotiate peace at Canton and then suddenly resuming the struggle, a charge based on the strange hypothesis that the mere fact of agreeing to negotiate binds a ruler to accept the terms offered by his enemies; cruel treatment of prisoners, an accusation true in some cases but most untrue in others;^[1] finally, mendacious re-